Fitness experts get asked that all the time and their answer is, the best exercise program is the one you'll stick with.

"Everyone wants to be associated with the best," explains Kevin Arnott, the City of Edmonton's supervisor of physical activity and children's leisure experiences. "But instead of asking what's the best exercise, people should be asking what's the best exercise for me?"

"For example, you might read that swimming is the best exercise, but if you don't know how to swim, it's not the best exercise for you," he points out.

Your thoughts of fitness also change with age.

"High-school kids that play sports don't think they're exercising," Arnott says. "They're doing it for the competition and the socialization. They will probably never go running on their own; it's just part of the sport.

"Twenty or 30 years after they leave high school, they decide they have to get active again, but instead of playing competitive football, they'll go to fitness centres or parks and walk or run.

"Older adults who never thought of strength training when they were young, will start if they find they don't have the strength to push themselves out of a chair, to maintain function."

To find the best exercise program for you takes some research, trial and error. That's the basis of the slogan adopted by the city's rec centres: Find Your Fit, Arnott says. People are encouraged to come out and try different classes until they find the one that suits them best.

"A colleague of mine says it's like deep-sea treasure hunting. To find the gold, you've got to get into the water and explore until you find it," Ar-nott explains.

"Staying on the boat or just jumping on the latest trend and finding it doesn't work for you, reinforces people's thinking that there's nothing good out there for them."

If you decide to do a cardio class, which is the best one: the one with a low intensity warm-up and cool down? The one with a 20-20-20 format (20 minutes each of cardio, functional strength training and stretching)? or the one that uses weights throughout the program?

And what about core work? Should it be done separately or is core work during a step class enough?

"If a class has a functional series of strength exercises, the core is used effectively as long as the movement is done correctly," says Edmonton fitness guru Marjorie O'Connor, who teaches a lot of different fitness classes.

"For example, a squat with an overhead press with weights works many muscle groups and core is a strong stabilizer. But if a class is entirely step cardio, a core component should be included."

Whatever program you choose, Arnott says it should have some cardio or aerobic conditioning as well as some strength and flexibility training.

OK. So once you've found the best exercise program for you, is a 60-minute class better than a 30-minute one?

Depends on the class, Arnott says. You might be able to do a yoga class for an hour, but not a boot camp effectively. It also depends on how long you like to work out and how much time you have.

Maybe you don't even like exercising with a group, in which case working out alone or with a trainer is what's best for you.

You also have to keep challenging yourself: add a run or some stairs or hills to the same walk that you've been doing for five years, for example.

"There's no really black-and-white answer (to what's the best exercise program)," he says.

Still, if you were stranded on a desert island and could only do one exercise program, what would it be? "It would probably be a type of circuit training that incorporates cardio, strength and flexibility," Ar-nott says, laughing. "I would run a few laps around my island, then I'd do some push-ups and sit-ups and I'd do some flexibility exercises."

O'Connor says she'd work her heart by doing sprint intervals in the sand with a combination of lunges, pushups and planks.

If there was a log on the beach, she would do walking lunges with a rotational log twist. If there were no logs, she would do pushups, a burpee with a tuck jump and add two alternating lunges. Or she'd hold a plank position (holding herself up off the ground on hands, elbows extended, and the balls of the feet) alternating by bringing knees into the chest.

Whatever exercise you choose, "continue exercising until you get rescued!" she says

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